I’m here, I’m here. I’m just hyperfocused on the election, which I’m sure most everyone has heard enough about. But I’ve discovered some really cool new things while being hyperfocused.
I’ve whined for a long time about having a way to put all of my different little pieces of the web together in one strand, and now I’ve found FriendFeed, which begins to put things together. It has some cool features, but it’s a little bit overwhelming, still. Between Tweets, friends’ Tweets, posts, pictures, videos and the like, it’s pretty big. What I like best is the idea of having a feed like this that could be archived in context and saved. The other cool thing is that Tweets can be replied to easily.
Almost exactly one year after ripping on Twitter as the A-Lister’s new, hedonistic new toy, I have to confess that I’m addicted to it. 2558 postings addicted (as of this writing). You can follow me @Karoli. I have come to realize that Twitter really is an incredible tool for all kinds of things. It is really whatever you want it to be.
CommonCraft did a new video today explaining Twitter, but it only touches on its most basic use; that is, answering the question”What am I doing?” The thing I’ve come to realize about Twitter is that it’s truly a tool that is pliable, bending to whatever use you might have for it.
Some examples: You could use a tool like TwitterTools for your blog and tweet blog posts to folks following you. The Obama campaign uses it to text alerts to followers for events and/or speeches. (They also follow anyone who follows them) The Clinton campaign also has a Twitter account, where they don’t follow everyone who follows them but they could, and they could also use it to broadcast updates.
Twitter definitely is the place to catch breaking news, like today’s really sad news about Patrick Swayze, and news earlier this week about Gary Gygax of Dungeons & Dragons fame, and Jeff Healey, guitarist extraordinaire.
And of course, there’s tech news, like Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 8, beta 1 at Mix in Las Vegas, which has some interesting new technology (though I’d recommend waiting until it’s been taken out and driven a bit), or even FriendFeed, which was a hot topic last week.
If you need advice, there’s that, too. Got a kid with a high fever? Twitter it and someone will come back with help. Same for sympathy, and sometimes it’s just worth twittering a thought because…well, just because.
The photos I posted yesterday were taken with my Blackberry and posted to Utterz. You can send photos, audio and video from your phone and it will post it to your blog, Twitter, Flickr, and other places, too. You can send from the web, your phone, or anywhere that you can email or call in. Very cool and fun. Another similar service for photos is SnapFoo.
To some extent, everything I’ve mentioned here except Twitter is still in the early stages, but it’s definitely making the mobile web suck much less, for which I’m grateful. It’s nice to send something to one place, and have it hit all the places I want it to — Twitter, the blog, Flickr, wherever. It opens up all sorts of new opportunities to be connected with just my Blackberry, which is an unfettering thought.
I’m a convert. Twitter THAT.
Technorati Tags: twitter, utterz, snapfoo, friendfeed, social networks, mobile web
